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the bombs fall on the just and the unjust alike


lamuella

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Pun not intended.

A popular concept in cybernations ever since it began is that of the "just war". Everyone wants to feel like they are in the right, that God (vishnu/shiva/flying spaghetti monster/xenu) is on their side, and will bring them if not victory then certainly vindication. This is why we hear so much talk of casus belli, unwarranted attacks, pre-emptive retaliations, and other such ways of saying "yes, I'm making war, but I'm the good guy".

It's all nonsense, of course.

Cyber Nations is a war game. Not exclusively of course, hence the existence of both a peace mode and an alliance-sized attempt to run a war-mode-peace-mode (love you, GPA), but in general the game is, in the words of Churchill, long periods of boredom followed by short periods of excitement. War is the reason for the game. Admin gave us cruise missiles because he intended us to shoot them at each other.

For this reason and others, I've never been able to stay particularly mad at the monsters of the cyberverse. NPO just did what many other alliances were trying to do, namely to control what the game did. They did it well for a while until their tactics caught up with them. Even they, however, were victims to the desire to be the good guy, or at least the justified guy, hence their construction of elaborate webs of reasoning for going to war with particular alliances rather than the much more simple "We're bored and you'll do" which is the root cause of not just most wars in the game but a lot of wars in the real world.

There are of course good reasons to at least pretend towards a moral stance. One of these is that if you're pretty blatant about "we're bored and you'll do" as a stance, then the people who want to feel just will soon view you as the bad guy and jump up and down on your face. A more cynical man than I might- sod it, an equally cynical man to myself might (and indeed does) say that they relish the existence of these monsters and baddies because it's someone they can attack with impunity, and like I said war is the purpose of the game.

So what would happen if an alliance, or indeed a bloc, started to act as if the moral fictions under which we operate were nonexistent? Well, we have a case study for this in the form of the Unjust Path. They decided that the morals of the game were nonsense, started acting however they wanted... and were promptly rolled out of existence. Funnily enough, many of those doing the rolling were those who had profited from earlier activities just as "unjust" as those of the UJP (horrible out of character attacks notwithstanding). The major difference was that like the medieval monk selling indulgences and then fondling the local girls, they practiced public morality with private vice. If you practice such morality, then someone doing in public what you were doing in private is a threat.

This isn't to say that morals don't have their place in the game. They give us something to shout about in character. They let us call down the thunder of righteous indignation. In other words they add to the drama, and like any good spice they add flavor to the meat of the game. The error is in thinking that these morals are absolute, and it's an error that much of the population of the game commits.

so I'll take no side in the rights and wrongs of any war or crisis unless my alliance is involved. I'll push my alliance's case as hard as I can, because the debate is part of the game.

When the moralizing and the talk of justice starts up, however, I'll be stifling a yawn behind the back of my hand.

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Well said. I know it took me a while to get over my pixels and my outrage of others wanting to blow them up. Perhaps it took owning every wonder and realizing there wasn't much else to do in this world but blow stuff up, rebuild it, and blow it up again.

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Well said. I know it took me a while to get over my pixels and my outrage of others wanting to blow them up. Perhaps it took owning every wonder and realizing there wasn't much else to do in this world but blow stuff up, rebuild it, and blow it up again.

funny how that works out.

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